Inherited Risk: Errol and Sean Flynn in Hollywood and Vietnam

To the best of my knowledge this is a well researched account of the life of Flynn. A person who seems to be one of those types who is either loved or despised intensely, Flynn is a tough subject for an unbiased account. Mr. Meyer's book, according to some Flynn experts is flawed in some details however the basic facts and incidents offered are well supported and provide a truly tragic and sad saga of a man whose influence on myself has been inescapable! I learned of Flynn as a young toddler watching his films from my daddies knee. I always enjoyed Bogart, Cagney, Cooper and Wayne however there was always something so much more compelling in Flynn's classic films. It was very painful for me to read of his life. This is something I'd purposely held back from doing in light of all the unsubstantiated negative stories surrounding Flynn's life. It was particularly hard to read of his son's tragic life. Perhaps it's not possible to have an entirely accurate representation of Flynn or that of his son given their nature and circumtances. Being a new father myself I plan on spending as much quality time as I possibly can with my son!

Jeffrey Meyers, best known for his works on such literary figures as D. H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a gifted, at times brilliant biographer. Here he brings to his treatment of Errol and Sean Flynn his knowledge of the world's great literature. Meyers can take almost any figure and make him acceptable from a literary point of view. Who else could find a parallel between Errol Flynn and Edgar Allan Poe? One can imagine a future Meyers biography of Bugsy Siegel, with frequent allusions to Julius Caesar, Faust, and MacBeth.Meyers's gift for finding parallels between disparate people's lives is especially impressive. I found those between the lives of John Barrymore and Flynn to be especially compelling and insightful - more so than those between Errol and Sean. With reference to Sean, few will feel competent to judge the validity of Meyers' sections which reincarnate his last days. Some of it I found persuasive, but other parts - especially some of the links in the chain of logic - seemed weak; the recreation of "the facts" may be a bit too confident when dealing with mainly hearsay evidence. In the main section of this book Errol Flynn comes across as a tragic, forlorn, dejected, melancholic sociopath. The habitual choice to put Flynn in a darker rather than positive light surfaces in numerous ways, as in Meyers' handling of Basil Rathbone. All biography involves some shading of details, which usually goes under the heading of "literary license." But the deliberate reshaping of a quotation by rearrangement and omission, for the purpose of producing the desired result, is disingenuous - a distinct "no-no" for a front-rank biographer. At the top of p. 146, a long comment of Basil Rathbone is subtly rearranged so as to produce the desired result ? to contribute to Meyers' overall scheme of the father-son shared death-wish. It creates a false impression of what Rathbone actually wrote about Flynn, and leaves one wondering how many other things have been cleverly reshaped in order to fit the thesis.The question therefore lingers: Does Meyers actually get under Errol?s skin (or that of Sean for that matter)? The answer, I fear, must be no - despite what Meyers and his publicists say. Meyers, in my opinion, is far too detached in his literary mien to explore effectively a man like Flynn. His Flynn is a two-dimensional, black-and-white figure who set out to destroy himself. The real-life Flynn was an infuriatingly complex, three-dimensional, Technicolor personality. Meyers is a very careful writer, but he also tends to be a cold, dispassionate, joyless writer, with an occasional tendency toward shading and over simplification. One gets little sense of the joi-de-vivre of the Errol Flynn of this book. Flynn was at heart a very, very funny man.On the other hand there is something un-humorous, at points even tiresome, about INHERITED RISK. The whole thing is written from the point of view of Greek tragedy. It is doubtful th

There is a tendency to describe people whose lives veer into chaos far more frequently than our own as troubled. The balance is provided in this book by rendering an account of how superior the lives of ERROL AND SEAN FLYNN IN HOLLYWOOD AND VIETNAM seem compared to the rest of us. I'm partial to this account because I was already a fan of the Flynn associates in Nam: Tim Page, Michael Herr, John Steinbeck IV, Robert Sam Anson, and Dana Stone. Dana Stone gets credit for taking the photo in Ha Than in 1968 in which Sean Flynn, "In full battle dress and holding a grenade, with arms outstretched and right boot in midair, he charges over the top of the hill and attacks the North Vietnamese enemy. . . . After the officer was wounded, Sean saved the day by assuming one of Errol's movie roles, leading the charge himself and killing an enemy soldier." (pp. 55-56). There are few pictures of Sean in this book, but real fans will have the collection in REQUIEM: BY THE PHOTOGRAPHERS WHO DIED IN VIETNAM AND INDOCHINA, edited by Horst Faas and Tim Page.The picture of Sean Flynn and Dana Stone on motorcycles in Vietnam, c. 1970, facing page 97, might be rough for those whose expectations were shaped by Jack Warner's "considerable shrewdness and a clear grasp of public taste." (caption to picture 11). Errol Flynn was interesting enough to dominate the first 29 pictures in this book. Then number 30 shows Sean Flynn with a friend, Steve Cutter, in 1958, and the final page of pictures shows the contrast between the highly professional look of an American studio portrait, c. 1962, and how Sean and Dana would look when last seen by Western eyes.If armies are usually considered highly disciplined, as well as the most modern, civilized mechanism for establishing order in the midst of chaos, Sean and Dana miscalculated how outrageously the enemy in Cambodia would be striving for something else, that they hadn't counted upon. A journalist card issued by the U.S. Department of Defense was supposed to be sufficient to convince the inhabitants of this planet that they possessed the opportunity to have their story told to the world, and the cameras should have convinced the enemy that the main thing the Americans wanted to take was pictures. Part of Sean's trouble was that he was expecting to see more than the usual amount of trouble. The previous year, Sean spent a few days in jail in Djakarta because of a 17-year-old high school girl, daughter of a Caltex corporation lawyer and a princess from Sumatra, "named after a Hindu goddess." (p. 49). For me (still an effetely snobbish reader and broadcaster of my own opinions), being in the army was like spending two years with the Djakarta taxi driver who drove Sean and the girl to her home in his Mercedes taxi. The taxi driver assumed that the girl was the hot attraction that Sean thought she was and returned with a Chinese businessman. The story is related partly in words that Sean wrote to his mother November 2

As a long time fan of Errol Flynn, I had to buy this latest biography. This is probably one of the best written biographies on Flynn I have ever read. It is right up there with MY WICKED WICKED WAYS by Flynn himself. This book is painstakingly researched with obvious assistance from the Flynn family for accuracy. No outrageous claims are made as in the past books about the actor. It is downright eerie how parallel Sean and Errol Flynn's lives really were. Definitely a must read for Flynn fans and highly recommended to those who love all things Classic Hollywood.Reviewed by Miriam van Veen

Jeffrey Meyers has written one of the great father-son biographies, told in the bold and cutting style of his earlier triumph "Bogart." The introductory quote from Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender Is the Night" brilliantly keys the reader to the appeal of these two legends -- "There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions, who will do anything." While there is more than one legend as to the details of Sean's death at the hands of his Vietnamese and/or Cambodian captors, the author's research drew him to a reasonable, if not yet provable conclusion. There are good arguments both for and against each of several sketchy accounts of Sean's alleged execution. The focus of this book, however, is the impact of the life of the father on the psyche of the son. Meanwhile, others drawn to the mystery continue to pursue the facts of what happened to Sean and his friend Dana Stone. How unfortunate that the Vietnamese government has never come forward with the facts in its possession on the fates of any of the ten international journalists captured in the same area during early April 1970. What outdated political sensitivities could possibly justify the damage done for over three decades to the surviving families and friends of these brave journalists? It is encouraging that other recent works including "The Eagle Mutiny" by Richard Linnett and Roberto Loiederman and "The Last Battle" by Colonel Ralph Wetterhahn have attempted to focus on those left behind on the battlefields of Cambodia. Perry Deane Young's "Two of the Missing" is a great account of the disappearance of his colleagues Sean Flynn and Dana Stone. Tim Page's "Requiem" provides a stunning memorial to the work of each of those photojournalists lost in Cambodia and his documentary "Danger at the Edge of Town" continues to provoke admiration, argument, and most importantly further investigation.